My greatest goal is to educate people and prepare them for the inevitable challenges of family members dealing with personal property accumulated over a lifetime. There are ways for parents (not just elderly parents) to prepare their children to deal with these possessions equitably, thereby avoiding years of hard feelings, sibling battles, court fights, and other ugly situations.

I hope you’ll listen to this podcast and then pass along a link to another family member or friend who may benefit from this advice. Remember, it’s not too early to simplify your possessions and create equitable plans for your children and grandchildren to follow.

I have 8 adult siblings and we are currently having conversations about my mother’s estate (for the most part, we get along well). The difficulty for us is that Mom has her principle residence and some rental properties (with unequal values) in addition to some cash: while everyone wants to try to split everything as equally as possible, it cannot be done without selling the properties (which is difficult due to how the property is currently set up, and most/all of us want to keep it in the family), or somehow forming a corporation into which all the assets are combined and the siblings receive ongoing distributions (which also presents a different set of problems). The other dilemma is who receives the main residence (which has the highest value and also comes with an attached rental). It doesn’t seem there is any good way of making everything relatively equal for us while keeping the properties. It’s a little late to look into an insurance policy to even up the cash aspect. We anticipate a drawn out process to get it all sorted out as we are just starting to work on Mom’s estate since her father’s estate was recently finalized (after 7 years). All I can say right now is ‘Ugh!’.

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